While the quest for knowledge was storming ahead at the University of Alexandria,
the ominous clouds of the coming Roman Empire were already gathering. Whilst
Alexandria had become the world capital of thinkers, Rome was rapidly becoming
the capital of thugs.

Rome was not the first state of organized gangsterdom, nor was it the last;
but it was the only one that managed to bamboozle posterity into an almost universal
admiration. Few rational men admire the Huns, the Nazis or the Soviets; but
for centuries, schoolboys have been expected to read Julius Caesar's militaristic
drivel ("We inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy, our own casualties being
very light") and Cato's revolting incitements to war. They have been led
to believe that the Romans had attained an advanced level in the sciences, the
arts, law, architecture, engineering and everything else.

It is my opinion that the alleged Roman achievements are largely a myth; and
I feel it is time for this myth to be debunked a little. What the Romans excelled
in was bullying, bludgeoning, butchering and blood baths. Like the Soviet Empire,
the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own.
They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them,
stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists and copying their technical
know-how, which the Romans' barren society was rarely able to improve on. No
wonder, then, that Rome was filled with great works of art. But the light of
culture which Rome is supposed to have emanated was a borrowed light: borrowed
from the Greeks and the other peoples that the Roman militarists had enslaved.

There is, of course, Roman Law. They scored some points here, a layman must
assume. Yet the ethical substance of our law comes from Jewish Law, the Old
Testament; as for the ramifications, the law in English speaking countries is
based on the Common Law of the Anglo-Normans. Trial by jury, for example, was
an Englishman's safeguard against tyranny, an institution for which he was,
and perhaps still is, envied by the people of continental Europe, whose legal
codes are based on Roman Law. Even today, this provides for trial by jury only
in important criminal cases. Roman Law never had such vigorous safeguards against
tyranny as, for example, the Athenian constitution had in the device of ostracism
(in a meeting in which not less than 6,000 votes were cast, the man with the
highest number of votes was exiled from Athens for 10 years). So I would suspect
that what the Romans mainly supplied to our modern lawyers in abundant quantities
are the phrases with which they impress their clients and themselves: Praesumptio
innocentiae sounds so much more distinguished than "innocent until
proven guilty," and a maxim like Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex
shows profound learning and real style. Freely translated, it means "where
there is no patrol car, there is no speed limit."

Then there is Roman engineering: the Roman roads, aqueducts, the Colosseum.
Warfare, alas, has always been beneficial to engineering. Yet there are unmistakable
trends in the engineering of the gangster states. In a healthy society, engineering
design gets smarter and smarter; in gangster states, it gets bigger and bigger.
In World War II, the democracies produced radar and split the atom; German basic
research was far behind in these fields and devoted its efforts to projects
like lenses so big they could burn Britain, and bells so big that their sound
would be lethal. (The lenses never got off the drawing board, and the bells,
by the end of the war, would kill mice in a bath tub.) Roman engineering, too,
was void of all subtlety. Roman roads ran absolutely straight; when they came
to a mountain, they ran over the top of the mountain as pigheadedly as one of
Stalin's frontal assaults. Greek soldiers used to adapt their camps to the terrain;
but the Roman army, at the end of a days' march, would invariably set up exactly
the same camp, no matter whether in the Alps or in Egypt. If the terrain did
not correspond to the one and only model decreed by the military bureaucracy,
so much the worse for the terrain; it was dug up until it fitted into the Roman
Empire. The Roman aqueducts were bigger than those that had been used centuries
earlier in the ancient world; but they were administered with extremely poor
knowledge of hydraulics. Long after Heron of Alexandria (1st century A.D.) had
designed water clocks, water turbines and two-cylinder water pumps, and had
written works on these subjects, the Romans were still describing the performance
of their aqueducts in terms of the quinaria, a measure of the cross-section
of the flow, as if the volume of the flow did not also depend on its velocity.
The same unit was used in charging users of large pipes tapping the aqueduct;
the Roman engineers failed to realize that doubling the cross-section would
more than double the flow of water. Heron could never have blundered like this.

The architecture of the thugs also differs from that of normal societies.
It can often be recognized by the megalomaniac style of their public buildings
and facilities. The Moscow subway is a faithful copy of the London Underground,
except that its stations and corridors are filled with statues of homo sovieticus,
a fictitious species that stands (or sits on a tractor), chin up, chest out,
belly in, heroically gazing into the distance with a look of grim determination.
The Romans had similar tastes. Their public latrines were lavishly decorated
with mosaics and marbles. When a particularly elaborately decorated structure
at Puteoli was dug up by archaeologists in the last century, they thought at
first that they had discovered a temple; but it turned out to be a public latrine.

The architecture of the Colosseum and other places of Roman entertainment are
difficult to judge without recalling what purpose they served. It was here that
gladiators fought to the death; that prisoners of war, convicts and Christians
were devoured by as many as 5,000 wild beasts at a time; and that victims were
crucified or burned alive for the entertainment of Roman civilization. When
the Romans screamed for ever more blood, artificial lakes were dug and naval
battles of as many as 19,000 gladiators were staged until the water turned red
with blood. The only Roman emperors who did not throw Christians to the lions
were the Christian emperors: They threw pagans to the lions with the same gusto
and for the same crime - having a different religion.

The apology that the Romans "knew no better at the time" is quite
invalid. Like the Nazis, the Romans were not primitive savages, but sophisticated
killers, and they certainly knew better from the people they had enslaved. The
Greeks vehemently (but unsuccessfully) resisted the introduction of gladiatorism
into their country by the Roman overlords; what they must have felt can perhaps
be appreciated by the Czechs who, in 1968, watched the Soviet cut-throats amusing
themselves by riddling the Czech Museum with machine gun fire. The Ptolemies
in Alexandria also went in for pageantry to entertain the people, but they did
this without bloodshed and with a sense of humor; one of the magnificent parades
staged by Ptolemy II displayed the animals of the king's private zoo, as well
as a 180 foot long gilded phallus.

The Romans' contribution to science was mostly limited to butchering antiquity's
greatest mathematician, burning the Library of Alexandria, and slowly stifling
the sciences that flourished in the colonies of their Empire. The Naturalis
Historia by Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-73 A.D.) is an encyclopaedic compilation
which is generally regarded as the most significant scientific work to have
come out of Rome; and it demonstrates the Romans' abysmal ignorance of science
when compared to the scientific achievements of their contemporaries at Alexandria,
even a century after the Romans had sacked it. For example, Pliny tells us that
in India there is a species of men without mouths who subsist by smelling flowers.

The Roman contribution to mathematics was little more than nothing at all.
There is, for example, Posidonius (135-51 B.C.), friend and teacher of Cicero
and Pompey, who, using a method similar to that of Erastosthenes, calculated
the circumference of the earth with high accuracy. But if one digs a little
deeper, Posidonius' original name is found to be Poseidonios; he was a Syrian
who studied in Athens and settled at Rhodes, whence he was sent, in 86 B.C.,
to Rome as an envoy. Poseidonios was therefore as Roman as Euler was Russian.
(Euler was a Swiss who lived some years in Russia; in Soviet textbooks, he is
often referred to as "our great Russian mathematician Eyler.") Poseidonios'
value for Pi must have been accurate to (the equivalent of) several decimal
places, for the value he obtained for the circumference of the earth was three
centuries later adopted by the great Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy (no relation
to the Alexandrian kings), and this was the value used by Christopher Columbus
on his voyage to the New World.

But whatever the value of Pi used by Poseidonios, it was high above Roman
heads. The Roman architect and military engineer Pollio Vitruvius, in De Architecture
(about 15 B.C.) used the value Pi = 31/8, the same value the Babylonians had
used at least 2,000 years earlier.

It is, of course, a simple matter to pick out the bad things in anything that
is a priori to be run down; to tell the truth but not the whole truth
is the basic trick of any propaganda service that has risen above outright lying.
Was there, then, nothing good about ancient Rome? Of course there was; it is
an ill wind that blows nobody any good. But in a brief background that is getting
too far away from Pi already, I am not concerned with the somebodies to whom
Rome may have blown some good; I am only saying that the wind that blew from
Rome was an ill wind.

Yet most historians extol the achievements of Rome, and it is only fair to
hear some of their reasons. For example:

"Whatever Rome's weaknesses as ruler of empire may have been, it cannot
be denied that her conquest of the Western World contributed a great deal to
subsequent civilization. It accustomed the Western races to the idea of a world-state,
and by pax romana (Roman peace) it demonstrated the benefits of a long
absence of war, even if the price was the loss of political independence by
most of the races of the world."

Simple, is it not? It appears we missed the benefits of pax germanica
through Winston Churchill and similar warmongers, but all is not lost yet: We
still have the chance of pax sovietica.

Before Rome became a corrupt empire, it was a corrupt republic.

Across the Mediterranean, in what today is Tunisia, another city, Carthage,
had risen and its dominions were expanding along the African coast and into
Spain. That provoked Rome's jealousy, and Carthage was defeated in two Punic
Wars; but each time she rose again, and in the Third Punic War, after the Carthaginians
had withstood a siege against hopeless odds with almost no resources, the Romans
captured the city, massacred its population and destroyed the city (146 B.C.)

There had been no rational reason for the Punic Wars. In particular, the Third
Punic War was fomented by a group of paranoic hawks in the Roman senate who
felt threatened by Carthage's revival. They were led by the pious superpatriot
Marcus Porcius Cato (the Elder), who had distinguished himself in the Second
Punic War (218-201 B.C.) and who held a number of high offices in the Roman
republic, in the course of which he bloodily crushed an insurrection in Spain,
raised the rents of the tax-farmers and adjusted the prices of slaves. He vigorously
opposed any kind of innovation or reform, strove to stem the tide of Greek refinement,
and advocated a return to the strict social life of earlier days; in an age
when slaves were branded, flogged and crucified, he was known for the cruelty
with which he treated his slaves. No matter what was being discussed in the
senate, his speeches would always end with the words Ceterum censeo Carthaginem
esse delendam (For the rest, I hold that Carthage must be destroyed), a
sentence that has been copied in innumerable variations by people to whom vicious
bigots like Cato were presented as examples of the noble Roman spirit. For example,
Maria Theresa, empress of Austria (1717-1780), was given the following advice
in a note by her personal physician: Ceterum censeo clitorem Vostris Sanctissimae
Majestatis ante coitum excitandam esse.

Such is the background of the Punic Wars, which lead us back to the story
of Pi. During the Second Punic War, the Romans sent an expeditionary force under
Claudius Marcellus to Sicily in 214 B.C. For one thing, the king of Syracuse
had renewed his alliance with Carthage; for another, the Romans specialized
in winning easy victories over small foes.

But this time it was not so easy. Roman brute force, assaulting the city of
Syracuse by land and sea, ran into scientific engineering; the engineering that
is not bigger, but smarter. The Syracusans had been taught the secret of the
lever and of the multiple pulley, and they put it to use in their artillery
and marine defenses. The Roman land forces reeled back under the storm of catapult
balls, catapult darts, sling bullets and crossbow bolts. The attack by sea fared
no better. Syracusan grapnels were lowered from cranes above the cliffs until
they caught the bows of Roman ships, which were then hoisted by multiple pulleys
until the ships hung vertically and the proud warriors of mighty Rome tumbled
into the sea; Roman devices to scale the walls of the city from the ships were
battered to pieces by boulders suspended from cranes that swung out over the
city walls as the Roman fleet approached. What was then left of the crippled
Roman fleet withdrew, and Marcellus hatched a new plan. Under cover of darkness,
the Romans sneaked by land to the walls of Syracuse, thinking that the defenders'
catapults could not be used at close quarters. But here they ran into more devilish
machines. Plutarch reports that "the wall shot out arrows at all points,"
and that "countless evils were poured upon them from an unseen source"
even after they had fled and tried to regroup. Once more the haughty Roman warriors
withdrew to lick their wounds, and Marcellus ranted against this foe "who
uses our ships like cups to ladle water from the sea... and outdoes all the
hundred-handed monsters of fable in hurling so many missiles against us all
at once." In the end the invincible Roman legions became so filled with
fear that they would run as soon as they saw a piece of rope or wood projecting
over the wall. Marcellus had to settle for a siege that was to last the better
part of three years.

But, as Bernard Shaw said, God is on the side of the big batallions; and the
city finally fell to the Roman cut-throats (212 B.C.), who sacked, plundered
and looted it by all the rules of Roman civilization. Inside the city was the
75-year old thinker who had grasped the secret of the lever, the pulley and
the principle of mechanical advantage. Plutarch tells us that "it chanced
that he was alone, examining a diagram closely; and having fixed both his mind
and his eyes on the object of his inquiry, he perceived neither the inroad of
the Romans nor the taking of the city. Suddenly a soldier came up to him and
bade him follow to Marcellus, but he would not go until he had finished the
problem and worked it out to the proof."

"Do not touch my circles!" said the thinker to the thug. Thereupon
the thug became enraged, drew his sword and slew the thinker.